were still crusted with dried blood and grained with dirt.  Another had been pierced through the jaw with a bullet.  That part of his face which showed through the swathings about his head was terribly swollen and purple with congested blood.  The others had flesh wounds, mainly in their sides or their legs.  Some of them were feverish; all of them sorely needed clean garments for their bodies and fresh dressings for their hurts and proper food for their stomachs.  Yet I did not hear one of them complain or groan.

With that oxlike patience of the North-European peasant breed, which seems accentuated in these Germans in time of war, they quietly endured what was acute discomfort for any sound man to have to endure.  In some dim, dumb fashion of their own they seemed, each one of them, to comprehend that in the vast organism of an army at war the individual unit does not count.  To himself he may be of prime importance and first consideration, but in the general carrying out of the scheme he is a mote, a molecule, a spore, a protoplasm—­an infinitesimal, utterly inconsequential thing to be sacrificed without thought.  Thus we diagnosed their mental poses.  Along toward five o’clock a goodish string of cars was added to our train, and into these additional cars seven hundred French soldiers, who had been collected at Gembloux, were loaded.  With the Frenchmen as they marched under our window went, perhaps, twenty civilian prisoners, including two priests and three or four subdued little men who looked as though they might be civic dignitaries of some small Belgian town.  In the squad was one big, broad-shouldered peasant in a blouse, whose arms were roped back at the elbows with a thick cord.

“Do you see that man?” said one of our guards excitedly, and he pointed at the pinioned man.  “He is a grave robber.  He has been digging up dead Germans to rob the bodies.  They tell me that when they caught him he had in his pockets ten dead men’s fingers which he had cut off with a knife because the flesh was so swollen he could not slip the rings off.  He will be shot, that fellow.”

We looked with a deeper interest then at the man whose arms were bound, but privately we permitted ourselves to be skeptical regarding the details of his alleged ghoulishness.  We had begun to discount German stories of Belgian atrocities and Belgian stories of German atrocities.  I might add that I am still discounting both varieties.

To help along our train two more little engines were added, but even with four of them to draw and to shove their load was now so heavy that we were jerked along with sensations as though we were having a jaw tooth pulled every few seconds.  After such a fashion we progressed very slowly.  Already we knew that we were not going to Brussels, as we had been promised in Beaumont that we should go.  We only hoped we were not bound for a German military fortress in some interior city.